Random Things
by Serinity46
Summary: Ever get the feeling like something's familiar, but you're not sure how? Donna does. And so does Romana. Post-Journey's End.


_Author's Note: Inspired by myself, as one of those 'bored cashiers', immediately thinking of the Racnoss every time I see that one in the row of checkout lane books on the other side of the tills I work at. I've never read the book in question, so I dunno what it's actually about, but anyways, the cover and title called for a pointless post-Journey's End Donna drabble, which I guess kind of ended up blossoming into a fic, based on the thing I get asked by customers all the time, about my 'unique' name, and I decided to foster it upon one of the two people in my fandoms who has an even weirder name than I, and, since this isn't a Harry Potter crossover, I didn't use the one named Nymphadora. Review if ya want, and thanks for reading :)  
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_The Red Hot Empress_. It was one of those checkout lane paperbacks that Tesco toted, sitting in a row with about a half-dozen other differently titled books of the same size, and, unless you happened to be a reader of the book, something that thousands of people passed by without a second glance as they unloaded and paid for their groceries. Only the boredest of cashiers who'd stared over at the book and magazine covers during the slow, dead-as-a-Dalek moments probably had these titles subconsciously imprinted in their brains. Yet, there was the weirdest slight feeling of Déjà vu when Donna Noble's eyes glanced the book (the cover of it containing a silhouette of a person, and things which she thought looked like suns and razors that reminded her slightly of an old Gillette Venus commercial) while waiting in line at a Tesco one morning in August, 2008. Something about 'red' and 'empress' that stuck her to be familiar, though she wasn't sure what.

Probably just something she'd seen on the telly, she cast it off as, looking back to the other side of the lane and placing her small purchase onto the shorter black conveyor belt of the 15 items or less line, the chipper voice of the honey blonde in Tesco dress code on the other side of the counter's question of if she had her Tesco card today breaking Donna's train of thought for the moment.

"So, is that from Pompeii?" Donna asked the cashier, indicating the cashier's unusual name on her name tag.

The cashier, who must've honestly got asked questions like this a dozen times in one day sometimes, shrugged, having to now add _Pompeii, _for God's sake, to the ever-growing list of places that random customers thought her name could've came from, as she swiped the Tesco Points card with the scanner, before handing it back to Donna. She had gotten 'Italian' before a few times, but where on Earth had this one gotten a specific _city_ from, though, the cashier wondered with a slight laughing smile. She bet it wasn't too soon before someone actually asked her if her name even came from _Earth_, one of these days. Hell, _she_ even wondered, sometimes.

"Dunno, could be," the cashier answered, weighing and punching in the four-digit code for the bag of produce that Donna had bought, "My mum just kinda made it up, I think."

"It's different, pretty, though," Donna told the blonde, who bagged up a pair of jeans and a DVD that she'd just swiped. Her name had _twenty bloody letters_ in it, but yet Donna could oddly pronounce it correctly, she assumed, at least, on the first try. She wondered if the cashier's mum had made it up past the sixth letter by just pointing at random words in a magazine, to be honest.

"Thanks, figured out how to pronounce it, yet?" the blonde replied, just before scanning the fourth item that Donna had, "Would you like to redeem points?" She asked the redhead before her, as the option had just popped up on the screen, which Donna declined to, "Alright, that'll be 19.79 quid."

The cashier looked curiously at the price, the words 1979 striking her slightly familiar, making her think of Paris cafes. But she could hardly have been in France in 1979 that she remembered, she looked no older than perhaps thirty. As Donna fished out a 20 pound note, Romana shook it off as probably seeing it in an old film sometime and turned her attention back to getting her customer's change out of the register that had popped open.

"Have a nice day," Romana, handing Donna her receipt and change, smiled in her typical 'customer service' way, and turned to the next person's order, flinching she hoped not too noticeably at the book that he was buying. She had no idea why, but for some odd reason, she'd always been _terrified_ of vampires ever since that one dream she'd had about a flock of vampires, a strange boy, and an even stranger man.


End file.
